Ask most Americans when the term “witch hunt” became a popular metaphor for persecution and they will undoubtedly point to the 1950s era anti-Communist crusade. While “McCarthyism” reigned in Washington, congressional witnesses routinely decried the frenetic “witch-hunt atmosphere” and commentary in the press used titles like “Salem, 1950.” The Broadway drama "The Crucible" underscored the link between contemporary political investigations and the 1692 Salem witch trials. "The Specter of Salem" reveals that this twentieth-century cultural moment, often cited as marking the emergence of such associations, actually followed a long and colorful history of appeals to American memories of the witch trials. In fact, colonial Salem’s episode of witchcraft fears quickly became such a byword for the ongoing federal investigations into subversion that the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was reduced to publicly denying that his agency operated under the influence of “hysteria, witch hunts, or vigilantes.” But the very familiarity of Salem as an analogy for the 1950s red hunt obscures not only its use in a similar “red scare” in the 1920s, but its longer, richer and more varied metaphorical life in the American imagination.

In 1692 Salem, a charge of witchcraft separated the godly from the ungodly in the mind of the community. In the centuries afterward, in other moments of cultural crisis, the metaphor of Salem witchcraft has served much the same function. In public debates over religion, revolution, sexual harassment, gay rights, terrorism or any number of other contemporary issues, in every era Americans have evoked Salem to vividly illustrate the folly of a course of action by either fellow citizens or their government that they believed to be extreme irrational, and capable of destroying the nation itself.

The Specter of Salem traces the metaphorical life of Salem witchcraft. While the twentieth century American things of “persecution” when Salem is raised as an alarm, that is a legacy of the shaping of the memory and metaphor in an earlier national moment. This book focuses most directly on how, in the political and social crises of the nineteenth century, the unlikely example of the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials became a common symbolic point of reference for Americans.

Table of Contents
Ch I:  Mysteries, Memories and Metaphors: From Event to Memory
Ch 2: Memory and Nation: The Early Republic
Ch 3: Not to Hell but to Salem: Antebellum Religious Crises
Ch 4: Witch-Burners: The Politics of the Era of Civil War
Ch 5: Witch-Hunters: The Era of National Reconstruction
Epilogue: The Crucible of Memory

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